Digital technologies have had a monumental impact on music culture and the music industry. Indeed, the advances made over the last 10 years are perhaps the most revolutionary of any since the advent of recorded sound more than a century ago. The primary change is the fact that, for the first time in history, music can be produced, distributed and consumed all on the same platform – the personal computer. Within the digital universe comprised of PCs, the Internet, mobile phones, MP3 players, CD burners and other related technologies, music has become almost completely free and unfettered, a species of pure information that can be audited, edited and redistributed with the click of a button. This fact challenges nearly all of the assumptions previously held about music as a creative community, a commercial product or a system of institutions.
The digital music revolution has had a profound effect on the way music as an art form is conceived and created. All musical expression is comprised of a unique sequence of fundamental sound elements, much as a sentence is a unique sequence of words. Typically, the sound elements define the limits of musical expression, while the sequence is the locus of innovation. For the last four hundred years, nearly all music in Western society has been based on a set of elements called the tempered chromatic scale – the notes described by the keys on a piano. Until recent decades, every song in every style – from Bach's fugues to Miles Davis' extended improvisations – relied upon new reconfigurations of this now-ancient musical lexicon.
Today, the musical lexicon has broadened far beyond the limits of the piano keyboard to encompass the universe of recorded sound. Audio samples have augmented and replaced musical notes as the new building blocks for composition and improvisation, astoundingly expanding music's aesthetic horizons. To be sure, this advancement preceded digital technology by a few decades. Academic musicians like John Cage and Alvin Lucier, as well as pioneering dub reggae and hip-hop producers such as Lee "Scratch" Perry, DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, used analog recording technology to paint sound pictures with samples. However, until the advent of digital music, these were fairly arcane practices, requiring a degree of interest and expertise beyond the scope of more traditional instruments.
Today the tools of audio sequencing and remixing are as accessible as the keys of a piano or the strings of a guitar. With minimal effort, any PC owner can use free and intuitive software to make new music entirely from pieces of other music and sound. This fact has changed the shape and practices of the creative community. As we argued earlier, there always has been a significant gray area between the opposing roles of producer and consumer. However, the limitations of pre-digital music technology reinforced this distinction, defining producers as those with the instruments and recording studios, and consumers as those with discs in their hands and electronic devices with which to listen to them. The digital age has brought about a collision of production and consumption technologies and the liberation of music from physical products. These developments have in turn enabled a consequent collision between the roles of producer and consumer, and the liberation of the musical community from the strictures of these roles.
We don't mean to suggest that digital technologies have returned us magically to a pre-feudal communitarian state in which everyone was a musician. Clearly this is not the case. On the whole, the changes have been more subtle. For many music fans, digital technology simply means greater access to a larger library of music, and more control over how to listen to it. However, the power of digital technologies enables "creative consumption," in which consumers apply aesthetic skill and discretion to such activities as constructing the perfect playlist or recommending music to other fans.
For many musicians, digital technology paves the way to improve the sound of their traditional instruments in the recording studio and to lower the cost of the recording process. And for everyone involved in music, the bottom line is the same – digital technology allows more people to have more access to more music, and more power over it. In other words, it has created a vaster, exponentially richer music commons.
These changes also represent a challenge to the traditional ways in which the music industry has conducted business. When recorded music was attached to physical objects like CDs and cassettes, it possessed two qualities that economists refer to as rivalry (meaning only one person or group can use one resource at a time) and extendability (meaning that a person or group can be prevented from accessing a resource). According to standard economic theory, resources that are both rival and excludable fall under the category of "private goods," best treated as property and exploited through the market system. However, when music was decoupled from physical delivery mechanisms, it ceased to be either rival or excludable, re categorizing it as a "public good." Public goods notoriously are difficult to profit from via traditional market practices; rather, they tend to be managed by governmental or non-profit entities.It is easy to understand how the traditional music economy suddenly has been rendered obsolete. The best strategy the music industry can follow if it hopes to continue profiting from the distribution of music somehow is to tie its newly non-rival, non-excludable goods to other rival and excludable goods or services. This is no doubt the rationale behind the music industry's well-advised recent support for new distribution models like online music subscriptions and its increased enthusiasm for licensing popular songs to video games and other entertainment product categories.
The industry's loss of physical control over the distribution and use of music has had other significant effects as well. One major development is a renewed focus on intellectual property as a blunt but powerful instrument of legal control, which has reached its most visible – and possibly the most absurd – in the prosecution of music consumers who share files over the Internet. At the time of this writing, nearly 7,000 individuals have been targeted by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for participating in peer-to-peer communities, one of the most prominent manifestations of the new digital music commons. Ironically, as intellectual property has played an increasingly central role in the music industry's control apparatus, copyright law also has become increasingly difficult to apply to music. Remember that copyright only protects the expression of ideas, rather than the ideas themselves. As Vaidhyanathan argues, the digitization and networking of music undermines this central "idea/expression dichotomy,raising questions about what protections legitimately can be enforced.There also has been an erosion of the concept of a copyrighted "work." Copyright originally was conceived as a way to protect entire compositions or scores. Even with the advent of the sound recording copyright in 1972, the law commonly was applied to complete songs or albums. With the rise of sampling as a compositional technique in recent decades, the American legal system has struggled to maintain a clear sense of where public goods end and distinctive property begins.
Two recent court decisions demonstrate the lack of resolution of these issues. In September 2004, a federal appeals court judge ruled that a song by N.W.A.
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